Black Mountain

by Venero Armanno

  Once the fire was roaring I shut the metal grate. It would take some time before this room was warmer. My stomach grumbled but I was used to that. Much worse was how thirsty I was. I drank draught after draught of water, and when I looked at Salvatore I saw that he must have been as hungry and thirsty as me.

  Well, he could wait, the gag was going to stay where it was. Instead I took some clean rags and a bowl of water and found some ointments in his medicine drawer. I went onto my knees and wiped and cleaned his wounds. There was a lump like an egg in his hair. Another just above his temple was much larger. Salvatore didn’t wince or reveal the slightest flicker of pain, though I was certain his terrible drunkenness had passed. I put plaster over his wound. His eyes burned into me. He must have thought I was attending to him in order to beg his mercy, but that wasn’t the case. I knew exactly what my prospects were. Instead, I wanted him to see what I could do, what I was made of, and that his world of cruelty and contempt had failed to enter me.

  When I was done I sat back and looked at him. Now Salvatore tried to speak through the gag. Nothing was intelligible but I thought I knew what he wanted to say: Untie me and we’ll forget this ever happened; Set me free and guess what, I’ll give you your freedom. His eyes, however, said other things.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ I asked. He nodded once. ‘Thirsty?’ He nodded twice.

  I retrieved the serrated blade I’d thrown aside. We were in near darkness now, the only light the glow from the fire in the stove, and this was the way I wanted it. Salvatore didn’t like the blade in my hand and he barely relaxed even as I cut him a piece of bread and a hunk of pepato cheese. The wind whistled outside, the doors and walls creaked. Something rattled loose out in the dark and wouldn’t stop. I reached behind Salvatore’s head and undid the shirt that gagged him. As soon as he was free he spat twice onto the ground and moved his mouth and tongue, trying to get them back to life. He took deep gasps, getting air into his lungs.

  ‘Water first,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, master,’ I replied, and he understood the heavy sarcasm in my voice. Even so, he probably still believed he had the upper hand, and that in a moment I’d be begging for mercy. I ladled some water into his mouth and he lapped at it like a great cat. Then I fed him some of the bread and cheese, but carefully, so that he wouldn’t choke.

  While he was chewing we both heard a heavy footfall on the step outside and the quick rap against the door. His mouth stopped moving and hung open, full of half-masticated food. His gaze was on me but now I had the blade up. I held the point at one of his bulging eyes. The sharp tip was a hair’s-breadth from his eyeball. He knew not to make a sound. There was another knock and a man’s voice called out.

  Everything was just about over for me. The door was unlocked, if this visitor wanted to try it. The windowpanes were bare, if he wanted to look inside. But I held the point of that blade to Salvatore’s eye and didn’t waver. My face was still dead cold and a sort of nausea hadn’t stopped rippling through me. My chest was hot but at least my hand was steady. Then there was another footfall, and whoever it was went away. Maybe the cold made him hurry off; maybe it had been Franco wanting his money for the three axe handles.

  I didn’t relax for sixty seconds. When I finally took the blade away Salvatore slowly started to chew the bread and cheese in his mouth again. He swallowed and asked for more water and I gave him more water, then he said, ‘With your leg the way it is, and the weather outside, why should I bother trying to do what nature will do for me?’

  The man was painfully correct. What he didn’t know was that I had an even worse impediment: this sickness in me. I tried to imagine what sort of a taste of freedom I’d have before my own body consumed me.

  ‘Got any ideas?’ I asked my master.

  He almost wanted to smile. ‘I don’t want you here anymore. Let me go and I’ll pass you on to another miner. I’ll say we’re incompatible. That’s the best I can do.’

  I shook my head.

  Salvatore said, ‘You think you deserve your freedom after doing this? You’re a boy who doesn’t even have a family or a family name. God made you for the mines and nothing else. If God wanted a better life for you, he would have given you opportunities.’

  I came a little closer to him. ‘God is the shit up your backside. There’s nothing over us. Nothing.’

  Now he did smile. ‘You see why there’s no road for you? You think that because you’re empty, the entire universe must be the same.’

  Salvatore shook his head. That glaze had gone out of his eyes and now they seemed to glitter with delight. Perhaps with even a little anticipation. I made that stop by stuffing my own mouth with the last of the bread and cheese, and retying his gag. Hard and tight.

  He hadn’t expected that.

  What I expected was that sooner or later someone else would come to the cabin, or that the person who’d knocked at the door would return. Maybe Salvatore spent some evenings like this with other miners, drinking, playing cards, I couldn’t know for sure. I stuffed my mouth with food and made sure to lock the door and latch tight all the windows. Snow was now falling hard. The only good thing about that was that it would quickly cover my tracks.

  It was time to go if I was going to have any chance of surviving much past the next few minutes or hours, and it was strange that despite the terminal sentence of the sickness growing so quickly inside me, no part of me wanted to give up, to die. There was only one thing in my mind, only one reasonable objective, and it was this: to be allowed to face Father Death my own way. Even by my own hand, if it came to that. I didn’t want to give Salvatore or any of the other men in this hell the ultimate authority, the power of being the ones to end my life.

  It wasn’t much to hang on to, but it was all I had to keep me going. It was time to try to trick Salvatore so that he’d never guess what sort of a plan I had in mind.

  I pretended to start to lose my nerve, making my actions and movements more frantic, more agitated. I mumbled to myself ridiculous non sequiturs he could attribute to someone coming apart. I let him see my trembling hands. I let him see me moving around the kitchen as if with nowhere to go.

  ‘You say I don’t have a family, but I do, I know where they are, I know all of them and I know my name,’ I babbled, the words coming out of me a lot more freely than I liked to acknowledge. ‘If I stay here you’ll kill me, I know what you do to boys like me, I know it because you let me see it with my own eyes. Angelino, you shot him like a dog, and poor Natale, you let him freeze to death out there —’

  I tried to get tears into my eyes. I think my sickness made them all watery anyway. Then I threw myself at Salvatore and grabbed his hairy face.

  ‘You won’t catch me, you’ve got no idea how fast I can run.’

  Despite the way I was laying it on so thick, his expression told me that for the first time he was becoming afraid. If my mind was unhinged then I might decide to do something really desperate – but all I wanted him to believe was that I was going to run and run and run, as far and as fast as I could, consumed by terror, the way Angelino and countless other boys must have done.

  Still moving frantically, I found two sacks and started to fill them with as much of Salvatore’s food I could find. I threw his larder open and took cheeses and salamis, preserved meats and dried fruits, nuts, raisins, anything. Soon, of course, those two sacks held more than it was smart to carry, but I needed them, or else I couldn’t see how my plan would succeed.

  When I reached behind his head to loosen the gag so that he wouldn’t choke, my hands were trembling without the need to pretend. Maybe the act was the real part of me after all. Then I went into the small room where Salvatore slept and found heavy clothes to wear. I tried to pick things that didn’t carry too much of his stink. With extra pairs of socks, his boots were a reasonable fit. I pulled an overcoat over my new attire, all of it loose becau
se he was so big.

  When I emerged dressed in his clothes, Salvatore’s eyes filled with impotent fury. I pulled a woollen cap down over my ears. Maybe this ruined my entire performance, the fact that I would have enough presence of mind to dress as warmly as I could, and to protect my face and ears. I didn’t know, I couldn’t think straight anymore. I found gloves and pulled them on, then hefted the heavy sacks and placed them near the door. I looked at Salvatore but now I’d lost the facility for words. The serrated knife was on the floor. I went over and picked it up. My escape really would be much easier if I ran that blade across his throat. It might take days or a week before anyone discovered him and raised the alarm. He must have known what I was thinking. I put the knife into one of the sacks, left him where he was, trussed like an animal but safe, and carefully unlocked the door and edged it open. I hefted the sacks over my shoulder, gripping them with one hand.

  At first it was almost impossible to see through the snow flurries, but the swirling winds actually helped. It scattered the snow as it fell, so that as my eyes adjusted I could see a way ahead. The entire ravaged landscape was white. There were fires in the distance and a great glow that was the smelter. Tonight it looked like some shimmering doorway. Winter had turned our immense graveyard into a sort of fairy paradise.

  I set out, striding quickly, my right leg already burning and the food sacks too cumbersome. At least the work in the mines had taught me how to endure, how to go on doggedly when my body and mind wanted to collapse. I trudged through the snow, almost certain that no one was out, but keeping away from all the other mines and cabins anyway, leaving this wasteland behind and travelling by instinct in the direction I decided I didn’t want to go, which was north-east. Let them think I had family somewhere in a place like Palermo, and that I actually believed I could traverse more than a hundred kilometres overland in order to get there.

  The snow on the ground wasn’t thick enough to slow me down, but in a way I wished there was more of it, so that when a party set out after me they’d have incontrovertible proof of the direction I’d taken. Still, I doubted anyone would find Salvatore until at least tomorrow, if that, and maybe all my tracks would be gone by then anyway. My plan would have to work even without the tracks. I hoped I had acted my role well enough with Salvatore. And, anyway, the miners tended to keep to themselves, or kept at least to their own camps and the teams who lived there. What made me wonder was that knock at the door. Maybe whoever had come would return the next night and discover Salvatore. Or perhaps Salvatore would never be found and would simply die in his bonds of thirst and hunger. I tried not to think about him or the possibilities, because whenever I did, the strongest picture in my mind was this one: Salvatore catching up to me and raising his rifle, a satisfied look in his bulging eyes as he shot me through the head.

  It was difficult to measure time. What I knew was that it had to have been well before midnight when I set out, and I’d already been walking for hours. I was probably safe to keep going another hour or two before dropping one of the food sacks as a marker for trackers to be certain of my direction, then to double back, retracing my steps. I had to return to the sulphur camps before the first gleaming of dawn; if I didn’t all would be lost.

  My plan was simple: from the haphazard way we’d tried to track Angelino down, I’d learned that the miners were not very good at manhunts and no one was likely to recognise one set of footsteps made inside another set. I’d retrace my steps as perfectly as I could, hoping the snow would cover any disparity, then I’d hide in the sulphur camp itself.

  There were obvious flaws to this plan. Not only was it virtually impossible that I’d be able to retrace myself step-by-step, but once I was back Salvatore’s camp wasn’t my final destination. The old one of Giovanni’s was. So somewhere along the way a fresh trail would have to start, and it would lead straight to Giovanni’s abandoned mine. Well, I’d just have to try my best to cover those tracks behind me, and hope for good luck and bad weather. I couldn’t think of anything else. Trying to escape in a straight line was simply a shorter route to the grave.

  I started to cough. It came so hard my legs went weak, and I fell into the soft snow. Things were going dark inside my head. For a long time I had the sensation I wasn’t out in the open at all, but was in my bunk, asleep and dreaming, then the tightness and the wheezing and the inability to breathe brought me back to my senses. I picked myself up and saw that my wish had come true: the snow fell much harder. It would cover all telltale signs of travel within hours, offering a complete cloak of invisibility.

  This was my chance. I had to go back now. I had to trust the snowfall would continue through the night, maybe even into the next day. I had to trust that Salvatore hadn’t already been found and wasn’t on his way. The hunt had to start as late as possible, that way there’d be no inconsistencies in the tracks left. Otherwise Salvatore and his cronies would only need to walk down into Giovanni’s mine and string me up at their leisure.

  I opened the sacks and tried to reduce my haul, keeping the best and most useful food items for the single sack that I’d take with me – but my hands had lost their feeling and my vision was doubling and it was becoming harder and harder to breathe. The air itself was like ice, but inside my throat and lungs every intake burned like hot coals. I knew there wasn’t much strength left in me. I dropped the heaviest sack with whatever precious commodities it held. The men would find it and hopefully it would encourage them to continue into the north-east.

  I turned back. I hurried. Giovanni’s mine was my only hope at survival.

  This part of the journey was a blur. Sometimes I thought I was wandering aimlessly, the arrow in my head pointed in no particular direction. Other times I thought I was going in a circle and would soon meet myself here in the snow. And for long stretches I floated far above my body, as if my spirit was already out, free to observe the mechanics of a doomed boy’s final hour. I thought of the masters I’d had and felt no particular hatred or recrimination. Instead I was happy that I now knew the worth of being my own master; for these precious hours, for the first time, I belonged to myself and no one else.

  Then I saw the orange glow of the smelter and understood that, improbable as it was, whatever muddled plan I’d had in my head was close to being executed. I hung back at the perimeter of the sulphur plains and looked around as carefully as I could. There wasn’t much to see other than driving snow. I forced myself to stay where I was and scan the entire area, and do it again and again.

  The shivering grew uncontrollable. My face was entirely wrapped except for the slit-holes I’d made for my eyes. My cheeks and forehead burned. Perspiration dampened the cloth. My body was numb. I kept looking, searching, scanning.

  There were no winter animals and no men. Reaching into the sack, I took out a handful of almonds, cold as ice, moved the wrap down from my lips, and put them into my mouth. I forced myself to keep chewing. Whatever floating spirit was above my physical self moved on ahead, and in the cold wet darkness it showed me the way. I lost track of time, trudging and chewing, sweating and shivering, mumbling to myself and hearing voices in the snow. I kept away from terrain that I thought would be easy for men to read. Then by the most circuitous route possible, I was at the opening to the shaft that I remembered so well. I looked behind me. The tumbling snow was going to cover my tracks, and very quickly at that. As I faced the tunnel I felt relief flood like blood through my veins, and my legs decided enough was enough, and I plunged down into my old familiar hell.

  This tunnel was not as deep as Salvatore’s, but it was a long way away from anyone else’s. I knew every twisting turn as if they were a part of me, of my nature, which in a way they now were. I’d travelled up and down these subterranean passages for Giovanni hundreds, probably thousands of times. I was so weak that I could barely pick myself up or drag the sack of provisions after me. My muscles had turned to water.

 
I stumbled downward, the walls holding me up, the hot rocky ground always ready to greet my knees and the palms of my hands when I fell. I crawled down into the steaming pit of the earth as if crawling back to the womb. The womb of a woman I never knew, and who had never wanted me. Who was she? Where did she live?

  Down here it was easy to understand that there was no God. If God did exist, what crimes did He think I’d committed that I should be made to suffer for? Angelino, Natale, why did they deserve to be dead? And all those carusi, only half alive or already killed because of this shit of a life in the sulphur mines, why would an omnipotent being want to bring them into this world just to make them toys and chattels of men whose only real god was money?

  Skin on fire and hands trembling, in this place it was far easier to believe in the devil. As I continued downward, into this darkness that I had no need to light, I thought, Take me into your house, merciful Satan, you know how happy I am to be with you again.

  The fever lasted a span of time I can’t measure. Even after it passed I was still cooking alive. My hallucinations and vile thoughts had evaporated, but the heat in this pit went through my clothes and inside my body. My blood felt like treacle. I couldn’t move at any speed.

  Slowly I eased off Salvatore’s coat, which now felt as heavy as an animal. Then I opened the first shirt and took it off, and the next, and Salvatore’s undershirt too. His pungent odour was married to mine. I fumbled with the laces of the boots and they felt as if they’d melted themselves to me. Taking them off was like taking off great weights. Now my feet wanted to float away. I rolled off the thick pairs of socks and the exertion of all that made me have to lie flat on my back, lifeless as a corpse.

  Soon I knew I was still wearing too much. I struggled with the belt that kept me in Salvatore’s oversized trousers, and finally I was naked and sweating. The pain in my chest wasn’t as sharp anymore. Instead it was a dull ache that occupied my entire torso. My face was hot but this seemed more a product of the heat in the cave, rather than fever. I was in darkness deep underground, a wonderful black tomb, and I felt safer and more protected than I had in years. No one knew I was here. Maybe no one ever would. I was finally my own master.